Table Of ContentBORGES
ON
WRITING
BORGES
ON
WRITING
Edited by
Norman Thomas di Giovanni,
Daniel Halpern, and
Frank MacShane
E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
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Copyright © , by Jorge Luis Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni, Daniel
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Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
“The End of the Duel.” Reprinted by permission of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.,
from doctor brodie’s report, copyright © , by Emecé Editores, S.A., and
Norman Thomas di Giovanni. First appeared in The New Yorker.
Excerpts from “The Life of Tadeo Isidoro Cruz (-).” Reprinted by per-
mission of E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc., from the aleph and other stories -,
copyright © by Emecé Editores, S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
“A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín.” Reprinted by permis-
sion of Grove Press, Inc., from a personal anthology, copyright © by Grove
Press, Inc.
“A Page to Commemorate Colonel Suárez, Victor at Junín” and “Conjectural
Poem.” Reprinted by permission of Delacorte Press/Seymour Lawrence from Jorge Luis
Borges’ selected poems -, copyright © , , by Emecé Editores,
S.A., and Norman Thomas di Giovanni.
“June ,” “The Keeper of the Books,” “Invocation to Joyce,” and “John :.”
Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker. Copyright © , by The New
Yorker Magazine, Inc. These poems will appear in in praise of darkness, to be pub-
lished in the Fall, , by E. P. Dutton & Co., Inc.
“The Watcher.” Reprinted by permission of The New Yorker. Copyright ©
by The New Yorker Magazine, Inc.
“The Writer’s Apprenticeship” (entitled “Who Needs Poets?”). Reprinted by per-
mission of The New York Times. Copyright © by The New York Times Company.
Portions of the main text first appeared in Antaeus, The Columbia Forum, and Tri-
Quarterly.
Contents
Introduction
Part One
FICTION
Part Two
POETRY
Part Three
TRANSLATION
Appendix: “The Writer’s Apprenticeship”
Index
Introduction
Many readers have been so interested in Borges’ metaphysical com-
plexities that they have forgotten he has had to face the same prob-
lem every writer faces—what to write about, what material to make
use of. This is perhaps the fundamental task a writer must con-
front, for it will influence his style and mold his literary identity.
Borges has written on a wide range of subjects, but in his most
recent work he has returned to his point of origin. The new stories
in The Aleph and Other Stories and in Doctor Brodie’s Report are
based on his experiences as a young man living in the suburb of
Palermo on the Northside of Buenos Aires. In a long autobio-
graphical essay published in , Borges described this part of the
city as being made up “of low houses and vacant lots. I have often
spoken of this area as a slum, but I do not quite mean that in the
American sense of the word. In Palermo lived shabby, genteel peo-
ple as well as more undesirable sorts. There was also a Palermo of
hoodlums, called compadritos, famed for their knife fights, but
this Palermo was only later to capture my imagination, since we
did our best—our successful best—to ignore it.”
Here is the classic situation of the writer. Borges, the heir of a
distinguished line of Argentine patriots, with English blood in his
veins and military heroes as ancestors, found himself, through no
fault of his own, living in a community on the skids where all the
crudities of the New World were painfully obvious. In Palermo,
the war between civilization and barbarism was fought every day.
For a while Borges kept Palermo out of his literary conscious-
ness. And so almost every young writer shies away from writing
about the life around him. He thinks it’s dull or embarrassing.
Father’s a bore, mother a scold, the neighborhood is shabby and
tedious. Who would be interested in it? Therefore the young writer
often turns to an exotic subject and renders it in an exquisitely
complex and obscure fashion.
To a degree, Borges did the same. Although he wrote some
stories about Buenos Aires, for the most part he concentrated on
literary subjects. “Life and death have been lacking in my life,” he
has said; he has also referred to himself as being “infested with
literature.” The results, in his early writing, were predictable. At
a certain point he tried, he said, “to play the sedulous ape to two
Spanish baroque seventeenth-century writers, Quevedo and Saa-
vedra Fajardo, who stood in their own stiff, arid, Spanish way for
the same kind of writing as Sir Thomas Browne in ‘Urne-Buriall.’
